?Buffalo reminded us again?: Mass shootings prompt fear, frustration among members of Black, Jewish communities in CT

“It’s important that we remind ourselves that no one is immune to this kind of violence, and that we have to do something about it, we have to name it, and we have to support healing from this kind of pain.”Edwards said Buffalo had been a place Black people saw opportunity.“A lot of our parents and grandparents came from the south and migrated to Buffalo where there was opportunity for Black families to be progressive,” she said.The city has been suffering from crime and poverty in recent years, Edwards said, but the massacre is different in her mind, and so healing from it must be different.“This feels different because it feels like it was a direct attack on the Black community as a whole,” she said. We can’t go down the same road and the same path and expect the same outcomes.”There is a difference, Sukhera said, between terroristic mass killings like the murders of 10 at a supermarket in a predominantly Black Buffalo neighborhood, and the murders that happen on a daily basis in much of the country.“There’s something fundamentally different about what happened in Buffalo, because someone specifically, explicitly, targeted Black communities,” he said. “It touches every Black person, it touches people of color, it might touch people of Jewish tradition or connection.”Michael Bloom, executive director of the Jewish Federation Associates of Connecticut, said there is no doubt the ideology that led to the Buffalo massacre exists in Connecticut.“This is an unfortunate new reality I would say for all communities,” he said.